stadium logistics

Liveblog/chat event! The Big Ten Network is going to cover a Michigan practice tonight at 9PM EST, with a replay of last year's "Little Brother" game preceding the festivities at 7. MGoBlog will take the opportunity to spin out the Cover It Live software as a test run for a new feature this season. The tentative plan: have members of the Wolverine Liberation Army and some select others moderate CIL chats that will replace the chaotic free-for-all of the haloscan open threads. (If you've got a Michigan blog and will be available for home games there might be a spot or two open; drop me an email.) I won't be around since I'm going to 8 to 10 games this year and prefer my Ohio State games to be consumed in an atmosphere of solitary panic, but the WLA guys are pretty all right.

As far as tonight goes, we tried this once before when Sam McGuffie had his national TV debut and discussion quickly shifted from McGuffie to any and all things, which is fine. There will probably be some trenchant commentary on the event itself, but this will end up being more of a Q&A session with some good jokes/answers from the peanut gallery sprinkled in. A reminder: these are moderated chats so I have to approve anything that gets posted before it'll show up.

ESPN’s helmet clash was a stupid exercise designed to garner cheap hits and was unworthy of anyone’s attention. But this is pretty cool:

You can clearly see that "40" has no winners and the 413 was put up in the pro agility drill. You can also see that the fastest quarterback in that drill was... aww... goddammit... David Cone.

Moooooooo. Yeah, you know those enormous metal girders? You can’t walk through them. As a result, moooooving (ha! I kill me!) around Michigan Stadium this fall is going to be even more of a fiasco than it usually is:

Officials thought about opening the gates more than two hours before kickoff, but a review of scanned tickets shows the majority of fans wait until the last hour to enter anyway.

Get to the stadium early and use the gate closest to your seat and avoid Main Street. If you show up late-ish things will be even more difficult than they've been in the past:

To help funnel fans who approach the stadium from the south around to the northern side of the stadium, one of the northbound lanes of South Main Street, from Stadium Boulevard to Keech Avenue, will be closed to vehicular traffic and open only to pedestrians.

A barrier closing off that lane to vehicular traffic will be installed before game day, said Ann Arbor Police Sgt. Brad Hill. "Officers there will be encouraging people to use that," Hill said.

Rademacher says it'll be quicker to walk around the stadium to the correct gate than to enter the stadium and fight the crowds through the concourses.

The traffic issues should be resolved by 2010, when a second concourse will be added for the plebes in the nosebleeds.

Sad? Funny? Both! Details of Kevin Grady's DUI arrest have been released. Going over them is sad and horrible and all that, but also... well... kind of funny. I'm sorry if this makes me a horrible person, but:

Thompson said he asked for a number between 12 and 14, and Grady answered "15." And when asked whether Mickey Mouse is a dog or a cat, he answered "dog."

That's comedy. Not comedy: the officer finding Grady passed out with the car running but his foot miraculously pressing the brake. Grady, BTW, has been seeing scanty first-team snaps even in the absence of Minor and Brown.

Sidenote: during my brief dalliance with college-level quiz bowl I attended a "trash tournament," in which the questions are all pop culture blah blah. At one point one of the bonus questions asked a player on the other team to execute a number of sobriety tests, one of which he failed. It was not "is Mickey Mouse a dog or a cat?"